The Secret to Getting Found on Spoonflower with Keywords

1. Getting Found Online : The key to selling anything online is getting found. The same is true for the Spoonflower marketplace. Hi everyone. I'm Maria, and I'm here to help you optimize your designs to increase visibility and reach more potential customers. On Spoonflower, you designed a repeating pattern, uploaded your art to Spoonflower, received your proves. Your colors and repeat are perfect. But hold on. Your work is still not done. You need to select keywords for your designs, title, tags, and description. No one which keywords to use to describe your artwork is your first step. The search engine optimization, also known as SEO. Seo strategies, play a critical role in customers finding your designs on Spoonflower marketplace. What are keywords and why are they essential to Spoonflower designers? Your titles and tags are a select group awards called keywords. When it comes to getting noticed online. Keywords or your best friend. The keywords function as labels for each of your designs. Providing search engines with the information they need. When someone searches the Spoonflower marketplace, search engines use these keywords to determine whether your design matches what someone is living for. The search engine uses algorithms to determine the relevance of web page content. A unique formula that retrieves the information stored within spoon flowers data's structure. These algorithms may change over time to improve the quality of search results. So why is this important? Optimizing your designs, title, tags and descriptions with relevant keywords can attract the right customers and increase your chances selling your creations. And it all starts with identifying the right keywords that accurately describe your design and are likely to be searched by potential customers. Having relevant titles and tags is crucial in getting found online. In the next lesson, I'll show you the easiest way to start your keyword research. So get ready to brainstorm. 2. Brainstorming Keywords: You've heard the phrase, a picture is worth 1,000 words. When it comes to selling art online, those thousand words are up to you. Naming artwork the hang and a physical gallery is much different than given your work a title when selling it in your Spoonflower shop. In a gallery, you would want the title of your piece to offer a new experience, something refreshingly different. However, this type of name will not help you in online search results. It will not get you noticed. Instead, you want the concisely and descriptively, use relevant keywords for your titles and tags. Keywords that describe the Design's theme, color, size, and specific design elements will maximize their effectiveness. With the right keywords people can find you and your amazing art. If you wish to convey a creative name to your online art, you can always add it to your description or additional details section of the listing. When deciding on keywords and excellent place to start is by asking yourself, what keywords would a shopper use or even myself? If they were looking for my design? Think like a shopper and write down the words that come to mind. You want your keywords to be distinct enough to stand out, but not so obscure that customers never used them. Because these keywords help us search algorithm understand what your design is about. You need to be as specific as possible. To help you with this, review the following questions and write down your answers to these as well. What are the things that you see in your design? Whether it's dinosaurs, poodles, shoes, roses, or lady bugs. Take the time to identify the main objects or motifs. Use in your design. What is the theme of your design? Does your subject matter tie in with a particular theme, such as nautical, futuristic plural, tropical, Bohemian, a season, or holidays such as Christmas. Also, consider your designs, emotions and vibes, like moody, cheery, playful, and bright. What is the style of your design? This also includes art techniques. Here, you'll want to write down your art style, e.g. watercolor, shabby, chic, rustic, geometric, and vintage to name a few. Are any errors related to your design. Maybe your design was inspired by a particular time, such as mid-century art deco, pop art, psychedelic art, and 50s. Kitsch is so write it down. Who might like your design. Note the type of people who might like or use your design, such as teachers, chefs, gardeners, musicians, dog lovers are kids. What are the prominent colors in your design? Here you want to consider selecting two or three dominant colors. Use broad colors like pink, blue, and red, as well as more trendy color names such as hyper pink, soft orange in terracotta. And finally, what is the size of the objects in your design? By size, I'm referring to the design scales such as ditsy, large-scale and oversize. You should now have a nice list of terms that accurately describe your design that you came up with rather quickly. In the next video, we will take the keyword you just assembled and use online tools to find even more. 3. Keyword Research Tools: Okay, you're off to a great start. You've assembled an ample list of great keywords that accurately describe your design. But that's just the beginning. Let's take your keyword research as step further by using the words you've gathered from the previous video. You want to ensure you have enough keywords for your title and all 13 tax plus, you might've missed an obvious word that may not have occurred to you. I have two online tools to help me with this. And by the way, both of these tools are free to use. One, looked.com is an excellent site with many uses. Today, we're going to look at its reverse dictionary tool. In the search bar, you want to enter the most prominent motif, let's say the design features of frog. Here in the definition, I see the word amphibian. Wow, okay, That's the word I would not have considered. But then again, I'm not in the frogs. Now let's take the word amphibian over the Spoonflower and see how many design results we get. The goal is to get our design on the first page of search results. And of course, the more pages of results returned, the more challenging it will be to get shown on page one with the word amphibian eyes E7 gene pages of results, which is pretty good considering most capex top out at 119 pages, 17 pages for amphibian is much better than if I were to search for frog, which returns 58 pages of results. That's almost 5,000 frog designs. Let's look at the frog results a little deeper. Even with 58 pages of results, I have three broad designs on the first page to be transparent. One of the designs I entered in a weekly challenge nine years ago, and one-third place with it. All the love I received from this challenge is likes, comments, and sales throughout the years is now helping this design gets seen. It's worth noting that any likes, comments, or sales of design receives will help boost its position in Spoonflower search algorithm by interacting with other spoon flower artist. It in turn can help you rise in the search results. If you see designs you like, stop for a moment and comments on them. Many times those artists will return the favor. This one gets a boost from all its sales, even though it plays low and the quirky and Vivienne's weekly design challenge. Another side note, you don't need the land in a Winner Circle of a spoon flower design challenge, or design to generate sales. Goods, subject matter and killer keywords will give you the upper hand. And wouldn't you rather have more sales than wins? Okay, back to the words and Vivian and frog. I would consider both pretty good keywords, but I'd love to do better. Let's return the one look and see what other words they have listed. Here's one bull frog. Wow, only one page results on Spoonflower. That is a great keyword. So if the design included a bull frog, I would certainly add keyword. But let's say your frog wasn't a bull frog. Let's say it was a tree frog. Awesome. Tree frog is another grade search term with 376 design results. If we combine the two words into one, there are only 14 results. Perfect. I would consider both versions, tree frog as two words and tree frog as one word. Excellent keywords, and add them to my list. Let's move on to the other tool I want to show you. This one shows related words. Let's type in the word frog again. The first part here is towed. Another good keyword that returned 1003 designs and about 12 pages of results on Spoonflower. And further down the page I see tropical rain forest. That's what I'd like to look further into. Upon taken it over the Spoonflower, a returned over 2,500 design results. Well, that's a little more than I'd like. But if I were to add frogs after tropical rain forest, there are now only 60 design results, but greater still. If a customer were to type in tropical rain forests, tree frogs, that's only 26th. Results. You never know what or how a customer will search for things. And the great thing about tropical rain forests is that a works really well as a keyword for the frog subject. Frogs are the most abundant amphibian in the rain forest. These tropical frogs are also the most abundant in trees. How do I know that? I Googled it? A note on using keyword search phrases as tags. All tags must be 20 characters or less, including spaces and hyphens. For this long string of search words, say tropical rain forest, blue, green tree frogs utilize the following multiple tags and stand for the best results that get discovered by more searches. Tropical rain forest, tropical rain forest, blue green, blue green with a hyphen. Frog. Tree frogs as two words, and tree frogs as one word. In the next lesson, I'm excited to share my secret weapon for uncovering the best keywords and topics that truly resonate with Spoonflower shoppers. I'll show you how to have access to data-driven insights to create designs that meet the needs of potential customers. 4. Next Level Research: Get ready to take your research skills to the next level. Who were suggest is the perfect tool for helpful keyword insights. The free Chrome extension will provide you with monthly search volumes for queries made on Google. And it also integrates with YouTube, Amazon, and other sites developed by SEO expert Neil Patel. This handy tool can be accessed in nine languages, making it convenient for users across the globe. Once installed, all that's needed to retrieve relevant keyword data is to search using compatible web sites. The Uber suggest free Chrome extension is great for gauging the topics popularity or finding related keywords. However, the real power lies in its paid version, which unlocks a feature that has become my ultimate secret weapon. I needed to know what topics the Spoonflower audience was looking for and what keywords they use to get there. With Uber suggest you can actually see the top pages by traffic. Customers visit the most on Spoonflower. Talk about a game changer. The tool helps me identify the optimal words to include in my product titles, tags, and descriptions so that they appear in Spoonflower search queries. And not only that, it gives me a roadmap to what design topics are in demand. The strategy here is to take these in-demand topics over the spoon flower to see how much competition it has. When you find one with low competition, you've struggled. I keep a list of in-demand low competition topics for when I create new designs. It's especially handy when creating designs for Spoonflower Weekly design challenges. I will select the topic from my list and adapt it to a challenge theme. Nearly every one of my design entries cells before or during the challenges voting. How I place in a design challenge is not a factor. Winning is never my goal. Making sales is the data is constantly changing. So I liked the check-in every few months to see how the topics move. E.g. I've been watching cow print move up the list. So I decided I needed to get some cow print designs onto the Spoonflower platform. I immediately added 24 designs in varying colors and sizes. Going down the list, the words mushroom and frog are getting a lot of hits. Mushrooms are generating almost 15,000 estimated visits per month while frog is getting over 10,000. As we scroll down, we see more variations of these subjects, like cows for AGI, blue cow and cute mushrooms. But better still, you can look deeper into which keywords are used. Let's look deeper into mushroom. You can take these search terms to Spoonflower to see what kind of competition it has. E.g. let's take a look at neon mushrooms. There are only 150 designs for this. I would certainly add that to my list of potential topics to design. Or if I already had a mushroom design, I would consider re-coloring it with neon colors, or as seen here, adapt a mushroom design for the fall or Halloween keywords. It's super fun when you find a search term with little to no competition. Like when we look further into acute mushrooms. Let's check out cute mushroom doodles. Only 45 search results are here. Uber suggest is an incredible resource that helps me develop designs that are likely to resonate with Spoonflower shoppers and boost my chance for success. And this is just the first page. There are so many more opportunities to explore. Overall, Uber suggest has been an invaluable asset and increasing visibility in sales for me on the Spoonflower platform. And it remains a key part of my strategy when creating new designs. Don't just take my word for it. Try it out with their seven day free trial and see how quickly it will revolutionize your SEO efforts. I should add here that I am not an affiliate or sponsor. I am not receiving any compensation from Uber. Suggest for this endorsement is just what I use to make the most of your keyword research. Let's uncover even more places, the fine great keywords specific to the Spoonflower marketplace. So if you're on a tight budget, you will definitely want to be me in the next video. 5. Digging A Little Deeper: Never assume you can dig a little deeper. Hey everyone, In this video, I'll give you more great places to find keywords for your Spoonflower designers. Reviewing best-selling designs on Spoonflower is a great way to boost your tag game. Not only do they have the audience's attention, but their success also means they must be doing something right. Scrolling down any design page, I can easily find out which keywords those top designs have used. E.g. if I had a llama theme design, I would search Lama on the platform. Then click on a few designs with the same style and feel to mine and see which keywords they're using. Instead of copying and pasting exact keywords from any given design, researcher options and ensure your selected keywords are unique to your work. Every design is different, even if the topics may be similar. So every cluster of keywords should be different too. Not only does this help customers find what they're looking for, it boosts your listing in searches compared to other similar designs. Spoon flowers category filters provide an invaluable resource for finding perfect keywords. You can explore their top and trendy colors, style, and topics by hovering over the fabric tab in the navigation bar and drilling down further into the categories defined specific terms related to your designs. Here's how it works when a customer uses the search by categories feature on Spoonflower and drills down and clicks on lama, e.g. animals to farm to llama. It takes them to the results page of designs that contain Lama as a keyword. These filters are intuitive. Meaning if you tag your design as llama, a customer who selects the animals filter will also senior design. They're using these filters to determine tags is a good practice to help maximize the visibility of your designs. The Curated Themes on Spoonflower is based on Spoonflower is best-selling designs, popular online searches and up and coming trends. Use the theme titles as keywords for fabrics you may have already uploaded that also fit the theme. Or for future designs. Define the Curated Themes, go to fabric in the pages navigation and select curated themes from the drop-down menu. From there, you will see an array of theme names like neutral nursery or rustic launch. Here's a tip. The curated themes are a great way to generate ideas and inspiration fast. Use secure rated themes as prompts and consider what design you can create. The bid in each collection is the perfect way to keep up with what's popular and get fresh design ideas. It's also a good idea to stay on top of the latest trends. This brings me to my last place to find great keywords. Spoonflower releases, trend reports periodically. These reports include expert opinions, advice tips, and trending search terms. They give insight into what keywords are most often used by customers looking for particular types of designs, making it easier for you to take your designs fittingly so they appear in customer searches. When visiting the Spoonflower blog type trend report into the search bar to find these reports. Here's something else you want to consider. Take insight from spoon flowers blog is a great way to stay one step ahead of the curve when creating new artwork. By keeping up with the trends and themes popular within the Spoonflower marketplace. You're more likely to have designed selected by them for their marketing efforts and distribution channels. And being on Spoonflower is radar is a very good thing. In the next lesson, let's explore the process of creating design titles in more detail. 6. Creating Effective Titles: Because many customers shop or designs on Spoonflower by typing something into the search bar, you want to ensure that your designs appear in those searches. Now that you have identified a mix of keyword options, using them in the most efficient way possible across your title, tags and descriptions is essential. And I'm going to cover each one separately over the next three lessons. When creating the title, we must consider the design. What words accurately describe your design? What would someone type into the search bar to find it? The long-term success of your listing depends on how well you can describe your design to the search algorithm. Once you've determined the keywords you would like to use, you'll need to start organizing it to appeal to customers. And the search algorithm. As a general rule of thumb, use the primary keyword at the beginning of the title. This will help search engines understand your design and may boost the likelihood of your design ranking for that keyword. When creating the title for your spoon flower design, you want your title to be concise yet descriptive. I recommend that you use more than three words or more than 20 characters. However, going overboard and including too many keywords in the title is known as keyword stuffing, which can harm your SEO efforts in the long run. Yes, there are titles like this, and surprisingly, I am seeing this practice of keyword stuffing occurring more and more on Spoonflower. Even among popular designers, please don't follow their lead. The search algorithms know when you are cramming in a long list of keywords and your rank will eventually be lowered for it. Make sure the title makes sense and is easy to read. It's best to focus on creating relevant, descriptive, and easy to read titles, ones that makes sense. Otherwise potential customers may quickly lose interest. Descriptive keywords should be ones that an average person might search for. Don't get hung up on abstract names or obscure terms. They also need to be relevant, so keep out any words unrelated to the design. If your designs appear in irrelevant searches, this can lead to customer dissatisfaction and your listing being d prioritize by the algorithm in future searches. Once you have a great title crafted, you don't want to use it for more than one of your designs, nor do you want to copy another designers title. Each title needs to be uniquely its own. Ultimately, taken the time to craft an appealing and formative design title is key for helping make sure your design stands out and grabs people's attention. If done correctly, it can help maximize your chances of success. In the next video, I'll cover the best practices and guidelines for your tags. 7. Selecting Effective Tags: Whether you're a beginner or seasoned designer, choosing the right tags, it's essential for customers to find your designs. Selecting the right tags might mean the difference between a design being discovered and a design being overlooked. Unfortunately, it's not always easy to determine the best and most effective tags. But don't worry in this lesson, I will give you even more tips for selecting those perfect tags so that your designs get all the attention they deserve. So let's get started learning how you can maximize the potential of your tags. You can get more eyes on your work. For effective keyword tags, you want to balance broad and specific ones. Broad keywords are highly searched but tend to be very competitive. Whilst specific keywords are much less competitive, but their search volumes tend to be lower. So here's what you need to remember. Variety is key. A combination of broad and specific keywords is vital for ranking in search. Do not neglect the tag section. Skipping on tags is like not giving yourself the recognition you deserve. So makes sure all 13 slots are filled with keywords. If you don't take advantage of all 13 tags, seriously reducing the chances of showing up in searches and being seen by customers. Be mindful of copyright and intellectual property laws. Refrained from using the names of other contemporary artists. Artworks are copyrighted property in your tags. It's important to remember that while another artist's work may inspire us, we cannot use their name or any copyrights in our tags without permission. Make sure you double-check your tags to avoid any misspellings or other mistakes. However, if you have a word that's commonly misspelled, such as Ginko, consider including both spellings. This can expand your reach by ensuring your tags are optimized for all possible search inquiries. Let's now talk about the use of singular and plural keywords. Generally on Spoonflower searches, a keyword singular and plural versions, have the same search results. So I lean towards optimizing for the plural form. Since the singular form will be included in it by default. Unless we're talking about words with irregular plural forms like baby versus babies, then I may consider both variations, especially if I wanted to reach out to parents looking for baby designs with spelling variations such as gray and gray, include both versions if it was essential to my design. I wanted to mention that Spoonflower says their system notes these spelling variations and we'll see your design, whichever version you use. In my experience, however, gray and gray have always given me two different searches. So I will continue to use bold for this word and others. Similar occasions regarding SEO, things aren't always black and white. Therefore, you must test things and use your judgment. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to create captivating descriptions that engage visitors while providing search engine visibility. 8. Writing Descriptions: Let customers know the story behind your art and what makes each design special. It gives you an advantage over other sellers. If you're like most creators, writing descriptions for your designs may seem daunting, but it's worth the effort. Crafty and engaging stories is an effective way to connect with customers and make them more likely to purchase. Your designs, description, and additional details sections need to be informative, clear, and compelling. Tell the story behind your design, why it was created, what inspired it? Elaborate on the colors and techniques. Consider including how someone might use your design. This will help customers visualize ways your design could fit into their lives, making them feel more connected before buying. Here's a tip. Matching the customer's language is especially helpful in your design descriptions. I don't mean you need to know a foreign language. I am referring to the unique terminology, jargon, or slang for any particular subject. Google is a great place for this. In the search bar, type your topic with either the word lingo or slang. E.g. I. Would search surfing slang if I had a surfing design. Here you'll see sides with a glossary of surfing slang, surfer terms, and even one that will have him speak in like a surfer. So yo dude start finding new radical list of search terms for design topics and ride the wave to success. Using lingual specific to a particular topic gives customers and indication that you understand them and know what they care about. Giving you an edge when connecting with them. That sense of connection is invaluable when establishing trust, making potential customers more likely to engage with your designs. Note that these descriptions are not only for customers. Search engines also crawl through this information when determining ranking in search query results. For this reason, you should avoid repeating the same description across multiple designs by taking the time to write thoughtful and meaningful descriptions for your designs listed on Spoonflower. You'll be giving yourself as significant advantage over other artists who don't put as much effort into this step of the process. Customers will appreciate reading the details behind each one-of-a-kind design. Is that not only informed, but also connect them to your art on a personal level. Given them more insight on why they should choose your design over anyone else's. So go ahead, get creative, have fun, and hanged lives. In the next lesson, I'll demonstrate how customers can still find a newly listed design for a popular search. 9. Real World Example: It always seems impossible until it's done. Countless hours of thought and effort go into creating designs. But how much time and energy do you spend? Discovery and the keywords most often used by customers? In this video, I'll show you that even with a saturated niche or a new design, there's still a chance of breaking into it. And you don't need a massive social media following the take advantage of this, I only have a little over 500 Instagram followers. Instead, you need to invest more time in keyword research, which many designers overlooked. So let's look at a very trendy but saturated subject. Mushrooms. I just entered a mushroom design and the poisonous plants Spoonflower design challenge that is open for voting during this recording. So this is a new design in a popular niche. I chose this design because I wanted to demonstrate that a new design can be seen on the first page of search results for popular niche. Let's get started. When I typed the word mushroom into the search bar, as you can see, there are over 10,000 search results. However, IZ one of my designs for this highly competitive search on the first page being footnotes and mushroom hunter. I entered this design and then gnomes Spoonflower design challenge in 2021. And like my Japanese frog Cloud design we discussed in lesson three, it did not place well in the competition. But because of its keywords in sales, the design has worked his way to the first page or this trendy search term. Sometimes it just takes a little time to get there. For your new designs. The strategy is to target multiple low competition keywords. These lower competitive keywords increase the chances of customers scene, and buying your design in a search without directly competing with a more established keywords. This is very important to understand. Your designs will first be discovered through these low competition keywords. Then gradually build traction and visibility through sales likes and comments, which is how their rankings improve. So that eventually your designs will show up higher in the rankings under the board. Competitive keyword searches, Like mushroom in this example, there are few more tactics to give you design an edge over competitors vying for attention with these well-established keywords, which I will explore more deeply in an upcoming course. For now, let's continue with the mushroom design I recently entered in the poisonous plant Spoonflower design challenge. I needed to find less competitive keywords that customers might use so that my design would show up on the first page of search results. Mushroom fans might search for the scientific name of these red top mushrooms of polka dots called fly agaric. So let's type in fly agaric. Not bad. I'll add it to my list, but I'm still trying to get the page one. Generally, most customers probably wouldn't know its scientific name anyway. So when thinking like a customer, I would probably describe the type of mushroom I want. If I wanted a red polka dot mushroom, more than likely, that's what I typed into the search bar. So let's do that. Red polka dot mushroom. And look, there is my design entry. And it's interesting how, except for the word read, my title, read toad stool, rooms, doesn't have any of the words I just searched for. Which demonstrates how important your tags truly are. So don't neglect them. The word toad stool on its own, we turned 45 pages. The results, while red towed store returned 11 pages, showrooms Gardner, 13 pages of results. I also recall polka dot mushrooms in many children's fairy tale books. As you can see, even with a new design in a saturated niche, it can still be found in the Spoonflower marketplace. You just have to be persistent in finding low competition keywords. This strategy can be your foot in the door to becoming more discoverable. Each like comment or sale will boost your designs rank and increase its chances of appearing on the first page of search results attracted more attention to your designs and ultimately increasing your sales. That's why optimizing your listings on Spoonflower is so essential. It will make all the difference. 10. Course Project: What's your skills to the test and show off your work. For your project. You're going to do one of two things. Either share a picture of your printed worksheet filled in with the keyword research for one of your designs, or share a screen capture of the actual designs, marketing and selling section on Spoonflower showing the title, description, and tags. This is an excellent opportunity to try out what you learned in the course and give feedback. Once you have completed your project work and uploaded it to the projects gallery, checkout, all your fellow students projects. Hi, I'm always inspired when I see the diversity and creativity coming out of everyone's work. Moreover, receiving feedback from your peers is always beneficial, both in giving and receiving. Not only does this help ensure that everyone understands the content discussed throughout this course, but it also allows us to use our newly acquired knowledge and skills in contexts. So don't forget, once you've finished your project work, uploaded to the project gallery and check out everyone else's project. 11. Final Thoughts: Congratulations on completing the course. You now have the tools and techniques for your designs. This stand out from the crowd and create more opportunities for customers to find you. A good keyword strategy is an essential tool that could lead to exciting new opportunities and not let your hard work go unnoticed. Taking the time for keyword research may seem like a chore, but it's an integral part of marketing and promotion. Remember, people can't buy something, they never see. You will also want to take the time to update your keywords on existing Spoonflower designs and reevaluate them periodically. This takes patience, but it's essential as it increases the range of potential customers that could find your designs. Who searches. Having accurate, up-to-date keywords for your designs is critical for attracting potential customers and helping them find what they're looking for quickly and easily. By following me on Skillshare, you'll be the first to know when I read these part two of the secrets to getting found on Spoonflower, two goes on SEO searches where you'll learn even more tips and tricks to maximize your shots visibility, and performance. If you liked the course, please take a moment and leave a review. Not only does it help me, but it will help and encourage other students find intake the course. To do this, navigate to the Reviews tab beneath the video player, then click Leave review on the right-hand side of the page. It would be a lot if you can take a few moments to write one. They encouraged me to continue creating more courses like these. Thank you in advance, and never forget, create courageously.